March 16, 2015

Vanderbilt University researchers have found evidence that awareness or consciousness results from widespread communication across sensory and association areas of the cortex — challenging previous hypotheses that changes in restricted areas of the brain were responsible for producing awareness.

“Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human… read more

March 16, 2015

Researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and Kanazawa University (Japan) have imaged structural dynamics of living neurons with unprecedented spatial resolution and speed by using a modified atomic force microscope (AFM).

The AFM is a leading tool for imaging, measuring, and manipulating materials with atomic resolution — on the order of fractions of a nanometer — by scanning (“touching” and “feeling”) its surface with… read more

March 16, 2015

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a novel silicon photonic switch — the largest-scale, lowest-energy-loss switch reported to date. It features a switching time of sub-micro seconds and a broad bandwidth of hundreds of nanometers in the electromagnetic spectrum.

March 13, 2015

Scientists reporting in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology have used smartphone and sensing technology to better pinpoint times and locations of the worst air pollution, which is associated with respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

Most such studies create a picture of exposure based on air pollution levels outside people’s homes. This approach ignores big differences in air quality in school and work environments. It also ignores spikes in pollution that… read more

March 13, 2015

A new ride called Neurosis, based on research from The University of Nottingham, adapts the experience to the rider’s own brain activity. Its world premiere will be at the FutureFest festival taking place in London this weekend.

It draws on research being conducted by performance artist/professor Brendan Walker, a principal research fellow in the University’s School of Computer Science, described as the “world’s only Thrill Engineer” by The… read more

March 13, 2015

Engineers from the University of California at Berkeley have created an incredibly thin, chameleon-like material that can be made to change color on demand by simply flexing it with a tiny amount of force.

This new material-of-many-colors offers intriguing possibilities for an entirely new class of display technologies, color-shifting camouflage, and sensors that can detect otherwise imperceptible defects in buildings, bridges, and aircraft.

"A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth” --- NASA

March 13, 2015

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.

Identifying liquid water is crucial in the search for habitable worlds beyond Earth and for the search of life as we know it.

March 12, 2015

Researchers from Brown and Johns Hopkins universities have come up with a new way to evaluate how well computers can “understand” the relationships or implied activities between objects in photographs, videos, and other images, not just recognize objects — a “visual Turing test,” as they describe it.

Traditional computer-vision benchmarks tend to measure an algorithm’s performance in detecting objects within an image (the image has a tree, or a… read more

March 12, 2015

The Milky Way galaxy is at least 50 percent larger than is commonly estimated, according to new findings that reveal that the galactic disk is contoured into several concentric ripples.

The research, conducted by an international team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Heidi Jo Newberg, revisits astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which, in 2002, established the presence of a bulging ring of stars beyond the… read more

March 12, 2015

Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have developed a simpler way to synthesize small molecules, eliminating a major bottleneck in creating new medicines.

As the scientists note in the March 13, 2015, issue of the journal Science, “small-molecule syntheses typically employ strategies and purification methods that are highly customized for each target, thus requiring automation solutions to be developed [inefficiently] on an ad hoc basis.”